Keeping the sense of "weight" the previous games had despite expanding so much the player's movement in general and their control of their jump arc specifically is pretty remarkable. SC4 rarely uses the new hardware to load the screen with enemies or flashy effects, and it rarely needs to. It seems that from moment 1 of having better-than-8-bit hardware available to them, Konami started progressing noticeably towards the complete gothic atmosphere they'd master in time for Rondo and Symphony.

However, despite the technical leaps and gameplay changes, the persisting fundamentals here start to show themselves once the player acclimates in a not-always-positive light. Enemy designs/behavior is rarely more complex than it was in previous games, and while that's mostly OK in the levels thanks to other obstacles and the fact that blazing through with your 8way whip once you know how to handle enemies just feels great, the same doesn't hold for the bosses. The boss fights in this game are just bad and probably the biggest thing holding this back from feeling like a MMX-level generation leap. Once again, get the item that's best for damaging bosses (this time it's the cross) and spam it until they die. If you want to whip only, you can, it'll just take longer. The continuing simplicity is just a weird choice when so many of the boss monsters are reused from previous games, it's like if the Super Mario World castles ended with the Lost Levels versions of the original SMB castle fights instead of actual new bosses. (To be clear, my gripe is not that this game is a sorta-remake of the first and as a result has some of its bosses, it's that the levels feel enough of the time like a new Castlevania for a new generation that the bosses being exactly the same sort of interaction -- with the same characters -- as the old makes them all the more disappointing).

I should probably also mention the music. It's, uh, really good. Except for that remix of Vampire Killer you'll hear for a couple minutes on the final stage, that's really bad. But most of the soundtrack uses SNES's capabilities so well for so early in its lifespan that I guess that's a case of it standing out for sounding more like what you'd expect a dev's beginner attempt at bringing their old series composition to new hardware than all the great remixes and new songs on the rest of the soundtrack.

Maybe it's been too long since I played Undertale, but I'm not sure I really understand the sentiment that undertale shows some crazy growth over this; the most memorable parts of that game to me always were the music (which uh, is here) and the writing, which is very funny here too (and it's not like it's hidden away either, half of the NPC dialogue in Twoson is already that level. The item descriptions and other easter eggs at that point are just a bonus). The story writing is edgy yes, but like... it's for Halloween (you may notice it's in the name) and also has tons of jokes besides; is The Evil Dead "too edgy" to those who say this? I admit that's a bit of an exaggeration as the shifts here are sometimes jarring, and the hack's no masterpiece of narrative for damn sure, but it comes up with a good justification for a hellish version of the EB world to exist and then an original-ish way of pushing the player through it which is more than I ask of almost any mod.

Part of that 'originality' (at least compared to the original game) unfortunately includes a near-mandatory grind that I would say is a pretty inexcusable timewaster for a fan project with such little content besides. The original enemies honestly include some quite nice Halloween enemy ideas, more outwardly horrific ones, and corrupted/funny riffs on existing enemies, so either having more of those or enough of an EXP boost to not have to fight each type 100 times would probably help to keep the luster of the moment-to-moment experience of playing the game. Fortunately, the bosses are all pretty great and generally are beatable enough that you won't wear out their impression via constant retries -- the fact that the grind is still necessary though makes this a double-edged sword as it is in fact moving through the areas between bosses without getting your party wiped by near-unavoidable mob ambushes that makes up the real challenge.

Overall, worth a play for anyone interested I would say; plenty of romhacks and mods try to have stories but few can elicit a reaction from the player, be it fear or laughter, aside from the anger that a difficult one can prompt. The Halloween hack at varying times achieved all three reactions, which I think is no small feat for a small project.

Graphics and music are great here, both the NES and FDS versions are extremely impressive for their hardware. Same goes for the character variety and amount of stages/environments though impressive doesn't necessarily mean good in that case -- losing the six-stage, linear, minimal downtime arcade structure of the first game robs some of the impetus to play in my view. Playing CV1 over and over for a 1cc, whip only level clear, beating bosses w/o abusing holywater, etc is rewarding. In CV3, I have little interest in even starting to route a stage order or character path towards a 1cc, let alone seriously attempting one. So now that I've seen all the stages (which is still more content than most NES action/platformers, mind), not really much bringing me back to this one. Oh well, October is over anyway.

Really fun, too easy though, which I guess is an inevitably hard balance to get when youre trying to make a commercial game that also draws upon the creativity and audience of noncommercial and often quite difficult doom wads, but with the amount of difficulty options here you’d hope for Ultra Hard to kick it a notch higher.

I really like the atmosphere and music with the major caveat that I literally cannot see anything when I fire the plasma or chaingun.

Overall, good game, if there are further official campaigns/expansions I would definitely come back to them but otherwise the enemy and weapon roster probably won’t be enough to bring me back to user levels of this over the comforts of Doom II.

Really would appreciate if the discussion of this game would shift from centering around how “dated” (it plays like an NES/GB rpg. Theyre practically their own genre. It plays exactly how a modern player should expect it to) it is in favor of how ambitious it is. NES games rarely tried to be funny, affecting, thematically coherent, or even player friendly (yes I would say this, you have maps, constant hinting NPS, multiple options for free heals AND multiple fast travel options to get to them all throughout the game. Play 25th Anniv if random encounter rate is the endall for you) as this one does. That said, I mean yeah Earthbound is better except for the Eight Melodies which are are better here.

For most of the first half of this game I was thinking in terms of how wrong most people seemed to have gotten it, both pre-release with all the (dumb) “yakuza with ghosts” comparisons and later derision as a boring map game. The mechanics here are clearly much more, movement and combat alike driven by a much more expansive and less context-based toolset than games like AssCreed or Spiderman PS4. Even just collecting spirits was fun enough when the game gives you a cool grapple+glide combo and the freedom to just climb level geometry and make your own path — it really felt closer to a Dishonored or even Deus Ex. A clunkier version with a shitty unchangeable FOV and weirdly weightless combat, but still.

Anyway then the story got really boring and a big giant popped out in the middle of Tokyo and then Hand Guy said I had to go explore a bunch of random points to collect dumb things before I could progress the story, just when I had had my fill of exploration and wanted to actually push through and see what happens in the story. Well the answer is nothing bc I stopped playing there. The review is also over now.

Another run and gun people tend to vastly overstate the difficulty of (except on Expert but outside of trying to beat the final stage without dying it really isnt that bad), but that and music quality are as far as the similarities between this and Journey to Silius go. This is probably the only game I think about in terms of being a developer’s “debut title” because it is just that impressive how many things are done and done right in this game. The character moveset and level-to-level selection/progression are well ahead of their time, and while the weapon system isn’t groundbreaking it’s extremely well refined, with almost every weapon and combination having unique features and uses. Weapon balance is far from perfect, but it’s good enough on Normal that the average player should be able to clear the game in a couple hours once they commit to one they like, unless it’s Fire+Chaser as that requires a little more practice. What’s really impressive with the weapon balancing is the approach Treasure took to it wrt difficulty selection; kneecapping easymode combinations shows both understanding and consideration of the mechanics they created that were far from common in the early nineties.

Levels and bosses are almost all good, with the major exception of the shmup section, which, while it clearly resembles enough a real shmup to suggest the team’s background at Konami and the possibility (eventually realized) that Treasure could make a great shmup, is unfortunately really fucking boring and also has no checkpoints. The dice palace, despite being a high point in creativity, is also a lull for those having trouble or otherwise grinding out a challenge/new weapon run due to the waiting around you have to do to roll again, but the music is nice and fast forward exists these days so I won’t begrudge it too much.

Aesthetically Gunstar Heroes is pretty charming, but Treasure would quite outdo themselves pretty soon after this. I do really like how the font/look of onscreen text and life totals is something they kept around for so many of their later titles.

Overall, one of few single player games of this short length that I can say would reward any amount of time put into it, even if you don’t aspire to a damageless clear or WR score etc. Not that I plan on coming back to it super often, just that I can’t conceive of playing this game “too many times”, nor “too few” aside from 0. Classic.

Played this just enough to start to stockholm myself but not enough that one credit into DDP wouldnt snap me out of it. Yeah this is playable, has the lasers, has the hidden bees, has a lot of the enemy designs/sprites the later games would reuse, is one of the first bullet hells, etc. But every ship is so sluggish compared not just to DDP but any later cave game — to the extent that I’d recommend everyone just play TypeC since TypeA isnt fast enough to not be frustrating anyway. And all the bullets are RED. Hope you like it and also arent colorblind and if you arent that they never just naturally blend into the background — for me unfortunately 0 for 3 there. It’s always nice to dig deeper into hard shmups and learn some survival, pick up your own basic scoring strats (which here is mostly just short bursts of chaining but whatever), etc. Maybe doubly so for a foundational game like this. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I think the time I spent on this wouldve been better off added to the time I’ve spent on DDP, DOJ, or even Batsugun.

1credit Pb: reached 2-3 with 12.9mil pts, Type C

Replayed on NSO and enjoyed this way more than on Wii VC back in the day. I mustve played it using a GC analog stick or something the first time because I remember it controlling much worse than it really does. Game is mostly easy, but the exploration strikes the right balance between obscure/rewarding while rarely if ever feeling the need to write things down or look them up. Not that the latter can’t be rewarding, but the feeling of finding an item and immediately having an idea of obstacles on the other side of the world that you can get past with it is great. Super Metroid is the same way so its no surprise hacks and randomizers of both would be so popular — once youve played them its near impossible to forget “what gets me past this” so even when things are all mixed up you can always have an idea of whats next